MRCagney Resourcing

MRCagney's Management Team needs to forecast our staff's busyness (time spent on work) and utilisation (time spent on billable work) to decide how much work the firm should take on. The spreadsheet they used to that end was becoming more cumbersome and fragile with each update, so they asked the Data Science Team to make something better.

Rising to the challenge, we created MRCagney Resourcing, a simple web application to meet their requirements. Upon logging in to the app, a staff member sees a global summary of the busyness (or utilisation) levels of every staff member for the next ten weeks. It comes as a heat chart coloured in a perceptually uniform colour scale for quick and easy reading. This is the Management Team's key view.

Additionally, each staff member can access a detailed local view of his or her own resourcing forecast split by job. He or she can then edit the number of forecast hours per job in tabular form, add new jobs, and delete old jobs. Leave is also included here.

Each change is saved automatically and the local and global heat charts updated.

Those features, plus buttons to export the data, comprise the whole app. Pretty simple, and because the business logic is separate from the user interface, the user needn't worry about breaking the app with each edit, a common problem with the former spreadsheet implementation.

"In consulting, it is challenging to balance workloads across the days, weeks, and months. MRCagney Resourcing helps us smooth out the lumps, share work across the team, and communicate potential crunch points." ~Kent Lundberg, Technical Director at MRCagney

The "try it" button below works for MRCagney staff only. Contact us if your company is interested in the application.

Try it!